268082 - No way to specify margins for header/footer

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Stefan Hoffmeister]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041103 Firefox/1.0RC2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041103 Firefox/1.0RC2

I believe not providing margins for footer/header is a design-defect in Mozilla
/ Firefox.

The effect of this shows up nicely when using PDFCreator
(http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm), a virtual PDF printer, to
create PDF copies of a website. [Aside: Yes, PDFCreator makes use of
Ghostscript, but that by itself does not cause the problem.]

Apparently, Firefix 0.9 uses printer margins to determine where to print headers
and footers - and PDFCreator appear to supply values close to zero. PDFCreator
doing this is somewhat to be expected, as the PDF document does indeed support
these margins. PDFCreator is also not able to predict which physical printer
might be later used to create hard copies - so PDFCreator supporting margins of
close to zero does make a whole lot of sense. But when it comes to acutally
*printing* the PDF using real hardware, it will be evident that headers and
footers do get cut off.

Steps to reproduce:

* Browse to any website
* Print to PDFCreator
* Open document created by PDFCreator in PDF viewing application

//exp: "sane" margins
//act: margins at the very extreme ends in the PDF that will get cut off when
printed onto a real printer

The only solution I see for this is to provide the following enhancement in Firefox:

Add UI element that allows choosing between 

  - "default" margins for headers and footers 
    [net effect: current behaviour is used]

  - "document" margins for headers and footers
    [net effect: headers/footers use the same right/left margin settings that
are used for the document]

  [- optionally: "custom" margins, where left/right margin settings for header /
footer diverge from the left/right margin settings for the document as a whole]

Note: 

I noticed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130075 but this talks
about *detecting* the right margins - this bug report argues that, at least for
virtual PDF printers, detecting the right margins is impossible.

On top, following my suggestion above would additionally provide a user-friendly
work-around for bug 130075.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.